In an increasingly networked world, more and more traffic, such as data, voice, and video, is transmitted over public and proprietary networks. The public or private networks process traffic based on the type of traffic (e.g., text, data, video, etc.), a particular quality of service (QoS) with respect to the traffic, a category of traffic (e.g., unicast, broadcast, or multicast traffic), etc. When processing broadcast and/or multicast traffic, network nodes within the public or private networks may replicate received traffic in order to transmit a copy of the traffic to host devices that are authorized to receive the traffic.
Unfortunately, when performing replications associated with multicast traffic, network nodes may not fully utilize the bandwidth and/or processing capacity of the network nodes. Additionally, network nodes may generate more copies of the traffic than are to be transmitted to the host devices, which may cause the network nodes to waste bandwidth resources and/or processing capacity. Wasting the bandwidth resources and/or processing capacity may cause the network nodes to become congested and/or reduce the throughput of the public or private networks.